Hongda “Harry” Wu, a tireless defender of religious liberty,
human rights and political freedom in China, died last week. He was 79. More
than anyone else, Wu was responsible for exposing China’s vast prison-labor
system to the light—and teaching the world a new and ugly word: “laogai.”

Laogai is based on a Chinese acronym for the phrase “reform
through labor.” After Mao Tse-tung established the People’s Republic of China (PRC)
in 1949, he created a vast network of laogai slave-labor camps to maintain
control over his subjects. Long after Mao’s death, the laogai camps would
remain an integral part of Beijing’s tyranny. It’s estimated that 40
million people have been banished to Mao’s version of the gulag over the
decades. Hundreds of these camps still pockmark China’s landscape.

Most of what we know about the laogai camps is due to Wu’s
work. This humble human-rights activist survived 19 years in the laogai system
but refused to be called a hero. “I am a survivor,” he told me during a 2006
interview, “not a hero.”

As a graduate student, Wu made the mistake of criticizing
the communist regime in 1960. He was then sentenced to the laogai, where he
would spend the next two decades of his life.

“When I was sent to the labor camp,” he recalled. “I could
not continue my religious life. I am a Catholic. Nor could I continue with my
political views, to complain to or about the communist government. All I could
do was engage in labor—hard labor. Sometimes it was manual labor, sometimes in
a coal mine, sometimes in a chemical factory, sometimes a steel factory,
sometimes on a farm… They would ask ‘Have you given up your political or religious views? Do you uphold
communism?’”

Despite the humiliation and the beatings and the broken
bones, Wu called himself “lucky,” explaining, “Not only did I survive that
hell, but I came to a free country and became a free man again.”

Upon his release, Wu won a ticket out of China when a
visiting American professor invited him to lecture at the University of
California. The PRC, wanting to get rid of the troublesome Wu, agreed to the
request. It would be a fateful decision—for Beijing and for Wu—because only
from outside the PRC could Wu tell his story and expose China’s gulags to the
light.

By 1992, after stints at Berkeley and the Hoover
Institution, Wu launched the Laogai Research Foundation (LRF), which is committed to educating the
world about the laogai system. Under Wu’s leadership, LRF won legislative
victories on Capitol Hill, raised awareness across the United States and around
the world, and cobbled together a disparate coalition of laogai opponents,
including human-rights activists, labor groups, religious groups, old-fashioned
anticommunists and trade hawks.

Wu became a U.S. citizen in 1994. Nominated for the Nobel
Peace Prize multiple times, Wu even changed our language: After
years of prodding by Wu, the Oxford English Dictionary officially included the
word “laogai” in its 2003 edition.

“Now I can go to the grave in peace,” he said, plaintively
rather than proudly. “We tell people that China is changing, and it has a huge
labor market. Yet this totalitarian regime has a system similar to the
gulags—its name is laogai. And now the world knows about it.”

Never seduced by the trade uber alles caucus, Wu recognized that even as Beijing’s elites
profited from the free market—even as China’s capital-ish economy lifted
millions from poverty—China’s people remained unfree. “We want to see democracy
and the improvement of human rights,” he explained. “Capitalism doesn’t mean democracy.”

To his credit, Wu saw a common thread connecting all regimes
that deny freedom of thought. “Just as Stalin had the gulags and Hitler had the
concentration camps,” Wu explained, “the Chinese Communist Party has its own
system for control—laogai.” Through the laogai system, China’s rulers “intend
not only to punish but also to brainwash. The government does not want you to
continue to hold a political view that deviates. You cannot keep your religious
views. They intend to convert you to what they call a ‘New Socialist Person.’
They aim to reprogram your brain.”

But Beijing went a step further than its totalitarian forerunners.
Wu recognized that rather than simply getting rid of the unwanted or smothering
independent thought, Beijing’s gulags aimed to produce goods “that can be sold
on the international market.”

Indeed, according to the Congressional-Executive Commission
on China (CECC),
“prison labor has been used to manufacture, among other products, toys,
electronics and clothing. The export to the United States of products
manufactured through the use of forced labor in China’s prison system and other
forms of detention reportedly continues despite U.S.-China agreements.”

Beijing announced in
late 2013 that it would close its network of “reeducation through labor”
camps. But this proved to be an exercise in word games. The name changed, but
the system remains. “The net effect of this policy shift was unclear,” the CECC
concludes, “as reports emerged that authorities increased the use of other
facilities.”

Moreover, Beijing continues its crackdown on people of
faith, especially Christians. The U.S. Commission on International Religious
Freedom (USCIRF)
provides the details: “The Chinese government continues to perpetrate
particularly severe violations of religious freedom…Inde­pendent Catholics and
Protestants face arrests, fines and the shuttering of their places of worship.”
Amnesty International estimates that “hundreds of thousands of people” are
subjected to arbitrary arrest and detention in China, many of them for
“peacefully exercising their rights to freedom of expression and freedom of
belief.”

As America retreatsfrom its commitment of promoting democracy and human rights, Wu’s words of a
decade ago are convicting: “The average American needs to tell the media, their
congressman and senators, and the president that we have to put human rights
and democracy on the table with the Chinese government. We should not only want
to see their economy improve, but also their human rights and freedom.”

Harry Wu fought
the good fight and finished his leg of the race. The rest of us who believe
in human freedom need to take the baton he carried.